Elia equips organisations and communities entrusted with the care of vulnerable children, in any culture or country, to do everything possible to place the responsibility for the child's safety and healing with the parents, children and everyone naturally connected to the family.
Wherever possible, Elia supports organisations and communities working with other vulnerable people to use our approaches to enable their work to be more participatory.
Elia is committed to providing organisations with fit-for-purpose, practical tools for both organisational change and child protection practice that work in their context.
When we have limited resources or have to choose between projects, Elia will prioritise the projects that focus on children’s safety.
Elia is committed to making Signs of Safety and our ideas available to any organisation or community that wants it. This means being flexible when taking our ideas into different cultures, working in languages other than English and being able to support work anywhere in the world.
Elia has begun a translation program to make our work and many key Signs of Safety resources available in languages other than English. As an initial step, this website is available in four languages: Swedish, Dutch, Japanese and English. We plan to add more languages in the future.
Elia and our membership currently have projects across Australia, Canada, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Cambodia, United Kingdom, USA and Ireland.
“Safety without healing is temporary.”
“Healing happens in the network.”
While the initial, and critical focus of most child protection work is to keep the child safe, Elia aims to assist organisations to go further and help the children heal through naturally connected networks.
Does this mean the child is responsible for their own safety?
No. Adults are always responsible for ensuring the safety of the child. Alongside this, the older the child, the more they need to be actively involved in, and contribute to the thinking and plans that are created to ensure their safety and well-being. The involvement of the child will also be shaped by the norms of their culture and country as well as their development, maturity and life circumstances.
There is significant overlap in the tools that are useful for working with vulnerable children and those for working with other individuals. Elia will prioritise our resources towards projects that involve vulnerable children but will share our ideas and support those working with other vulnerable people wherever possible.